The Lake of Dead Languages (11 page)

Athena’s eyes are closed when I enter her room, but when I sit on the edge of her bed she opens them.

“Oh,
Magistra
Hudson,” she says, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you all day. You’re the only one I can tell.”

The words sound familiar and I realize they are the ones I found on the journal page left for me two days ago.

“What do you want to tell me?” I take Athena’s bandaged hand and try not to hold it too tight.

“I didn’t do it,” she says.

I think for a second she’s trying to deny taking my journal, but then I realize I haven’t accused her of that.

“Do what?” I ask.

“Slit my wrists. I didn’t try to kill myself. Someone tried to kill me.”

P
ARANOID DELUSION BROUGHT ON BY DRUG OVERDOSE
,” Dr. Lockhart says when I tell her about Athena’s claim that someone tried to kill her. “It’s what I was afraid of.”

We are back in her office with its panoramic view of Heart Lake. Although it’s only been days, it seems like months since I sat here thinking longingly of a swim in the lake. Since yesterday’s first snow the temperature has dropped into the twenties.

“Denial of a suicide attempt is common,” Dr. Lockhart tells me. “In fact, I wrote a monograph on that very subject when I was doing my residency.” She glides backward in her desk chair and reaches for a file drawer behind her. I notice her chair’s sleek ergodynamic design as she arches back in it and how well its charcoal gray velour upholstery complements her clothes. I wonder how she got the school to order her such an expensive chair while the rest of us make do with creaky, straight-backed desk chairs.

She hands me a slim sheaf of paper that I expect is her monograph. I am about to utter some polite assurance that I’ll read it as soon as I catch up on my grading, when I notice it’s not a monograph at all. It is a letter, handwritten on pale blue stationery, from Lucy Toller dated February 28, 1977. The letter is to her brother, who had been sent, that
last year of high school, to a military school in the Hudson Valley. True to her fashion she starts out with a quote, one I recognize from Euripides’
Iphigenia in Tauris:
“A greeting comes from one you think is dead.” She then goes on to assure her brother that the official report of her suicide attempt over Christmas break was false. “I can’t explain now, Mattie, but please believe that I’d never willingly take my own life. You see,
Domina
Chambers has told me something that changes everything. When she told me I understood why I’ve always felt different from everybodyelse. The ordinary rules of the world just don’t apply. ‘Which of us can saywhat the gods hold wicked.’” I remember that it was this passage that had been so damning to
Domina
Chambers at the inquest.

At the very bottom of the page she had copied a line from a poem, “And sin no more, as we have done, by staying, but, my Matthew, come let’s go a-Maying.” I remember the Robert Herrick poem from Miss Macintosh’s English class.

I read the letter twice and lift it to see what the rest of the papers are, but Dr. Lockhart reaches across the desk and pulls the sheaf of papers out of my hands.

“As you see, even your friend Lucy denied that she tried to kill herself, and if the dean’s notes are to be believed, the blood from her slit wrists soaked through two mattresses.”

At her words my vision is flooded with red. I see the blood-soaked bed, the tangle of crimson sheets.

“And we know that suicide attempt was real. After all, she eventually succeeded. She walked out onto the ice and deliberately drowned herself. You saw it yourself, right?”

I nod, but realize from Dr. Lockhart’s continued silence that she expects more of an answer. “Yes,” I tell her, “she deliberately drowned herself.”

“She didn’t try to hang on to the ice? You couldn’t help her?”

“She didn’t want my help,” I say, “she practically dived under the water. She wanted to die.”

“And she didn’t call for you to help her?”

“No,” I say, trying unsuccessfully to keep the irritation out of my voice. “As I said she went right under. She couldn’t very well call for help from under the water.”

“So we can assume that first attempt was real as well. Besides it would be too awful if your friend Lucy hadn’t meant to kill herself that first time.”

“Why?”

“Because it was the precipitating factor in your other roommate’s suicide. Deirdre Hall?”

Dr. Lockhart extracts another sheet from the stack of papers on her desk. This one is a Xerox of a lined, handwritten page.

“Whatever happens now, it’s all because of what Lucy did at Christmas,” I read aloud. The last lines on the page were cut and pasted from a mimeographed handout. I read them to myself: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day / I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; / While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray / I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Yet another of Miss Macintosh’s favorites: Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

“Deirdre Hall’s last journal entry before she drowned herself in the lake,” Dr. Lockhart says. “No, Jane, I don’t think we should believe that Ellen didn’t try to kill herself. I think we should watch her very closely. And her roommates, Sandy and Melissa. I consider all three girls at grave risk.”

F
OR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS
I
DO LITTLE BUT WATCH MY
girls. I tell myself that I am watching them for signs of depression and suicidal tendencies, but truthfully I am also watching them for hints that they have my old journal. They seem, though, if anything, less troubled. Perhaps it’s only the change of wardrobe brought on by colder weather. By the time Athena returns to class all my girls are huddled in layers of sweaters, scarves, and flannel shirts. The sweaters hide the bandages on Athena’s arms and scratch marks on the
other girls’ wrists. The girls look more normal, less sepulchral, in their bright red plaids and fuzzy angoras. It’s hard to look like a Goth lumberjack.

The snows begin in earnest early, even for the Adirondacks. By Halloween the ground is covered, by Thanksgiving the mounds on the sides of the paths are knee-high. The campus takes on that enclosed feeling it gets in winter. I know that by January the feeling may be claustrophobic, but for now it feels cozy.

I speak to Olivia each night on the phone and visit her every other weekend. As long as I don’t say anything about her coming back to live with me, Mitchell says nothing about seeking permanent custody. I think it is better to leave things be for the time being.

I receive no more notes from my past. When I look at the lake I can tell it will freeze soon and I find myself looking forward to it, as if the past could be sealed under ice as well.

I go down to the lake every night, hoping to be there for the first ice. One night I find Athena, Vesta, and Aphrodite there and I almost turn back on the path, but then I see that Gwendoline Marsh and Myra Todd are with them along with a few other girls. They have blankets and Thermoses of hot chocolate.

“Magistra,”
my girls call when they see me. “Join us. We’re waiting for the lake to freeze. Miss Todd says if there’s a moon when it happens we’ll see the crystals forming.”

They call it the first ice club.

“It’s a Heart Lake tradition,” Vesta says, handing me a mug of hot chocolate.

I nod and burn my tongue on the hot liquid. Myra Todd gives a lecture on the physics of lake freezing and Gwen reads the Emily Dickinson poem that begins, “After great pain a formal feeling comes …” I wonder why until she comes to that last stanza, “This is the Hour of Lead—/ Remembered, if outlived / As freezing persons, recollect the Snow—/ First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.”

It’s as good a description of freezing as any I’ve ever heard and it’s not Gwen’s fault if it makes me think of Matt and Lucy’s last moments.
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.
Only they didn’t let go. They had each other to hold on to.

I
WONDER IF THEY ASKED THE DEAN’S PERMISSION TO MEET.
I wonder if Dr. Lockhart knows about the club. I find I can no longer judge the difference between a club meeting and a pagan rite.

When the girls start stomping their feet in the cold and the hot chocolate runs out we all leave. Gwendoline Marsh and Vesta sing “Silent Night” on the walk back.
Club meeting,
I think, definitely
club meeting.

In the second week of December I notice a change come over Aphrodite. She arrives in class late without her translation done. She’s no good at sight reading, so she can’t fake it. Vesta and Athena try to cover for her. I can tell they are giving her their translations because they are too alike. If I stop Aphrodite to ask her how she got a particular translation or to identify a case ending, she flounders aimlessly amid the syntax. Out of six possible cases she makes four wrong guesses. It’s painful to watch, so I stop calling on her, but still the littlest thing makes her burst into tears: Catullus’s poem about his girlfriend’s infidelity, Book Four of the
Aeneid,
the definition of the verb
prodere.

“What’s wrong with Aphrodite?” I ask Athena after class.

“She’s getting notes from Exeter about her boyfriend, Brian. You know, like that he’s cheating on her and badmouthing her. She’s on the phone with him every night and he swears none of it’s true.”

“She seems to be taking it pretty hard.”

“Well, yeah, they’ve been going together since the ninth grade. She says they’re going to go to college together. Only the way she’s going, she’s never going to make it to college.”

“You mean you think she might kill herself?”

Athena stares at me.

“No. I mean her grades really suck. Haven’t you noticed?”

I
DECIDE
I’
D BETTER TALK TO
D
R.
L
OCKHART ABOUT
Aphrodite. She listens to my story quietly.

“Of course I’ll have a word with her,” she says when I have finished, “but I doubt if it’s anything serious. The important thing is not to plant the idea into anyone’s head that her sadness might be suicidal. Whatever you do, don’t discuss it with any other student.”

I remember my conversation with Athena and the way she stared at me when I asked if she thought Aphrodite might kill herself. I thank Dr. Lockhart for her time and leave quickly.

That night when I call Olivia she tells me all about her new baby-sitter who watches her after school, about how pretty she is and how they bake cookies together. I think that being jealous of the baby-sitter is the worst I’ll have to suffer tonight until she asks me when she can come back to live with me.

“Soon,” I tell her.

I get off the phone and go into her room and lie down in her bed. On her night table is the
Tales from the Ballet.
I remember the part of the story when the mother warns Giselle not to dance because of her weak heart. Even with the best intentions, it’s impossible to always protect your child. I’m not sure my intentions have been the best. Did I really consider her welfare when I left Mitchell? I thought I took the job at Heart Lake because it would be a good place for her to go to school, but was I really thinking of her? Or was I following my own desire to return here? I think of the lines I read in Deirdre’s last journal entry: “I
will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
The last lines make me think not of a human heart but of the lake and what lies at its core.

I’m no longer sure if I even trust myself with Olivia. Am I any good to any of these girls, I wonder, let alone my own daughter? Am I, as
Domina
Chambers was accused of being, a
corrupting influence?

I go out of the house and listen for a moment to the lake.
For always night and day I hear water lapping.
The sound tonight is maddening. When, I wonder, will the damn thing freeze?

Instead of taking the path down to the lake I walk out onto the Point. Ice has formed in the glacial cracks. One wrong step and a person could slide off the smooth, curved surface of the rock and into the lake below. When Deirdre Hall fell to her death here some people, her parents, for instance, thought it was an accident. But then the administration confiscated her journal. Deirdre liked to collect quotes about death. She was also fascinated by the three sisters legend, especially after her roommate’s suicide attempt. The last quote in her journal, the one from the Yeats poem, seemed to suggest that she felt drawn to the lake in the same way the three sisters legend suggested that Heart Lake girls were drawn to suicide.

I hear a sound to my left and turn a little too quickly. My heel catches in one of the icy cracks and for a moment I lose my balance, but then I feel a gloved hand catch my arm and right me. It’s Athena. She must have been on the ledge below the Point and that’s why I didn’t see her. Behind her, walking up from the ledge, I see Gwendoline Marsh and Myra Todd with my other students, Vesta and Aphrodite. The first ice club.

“Magistra,”
Athena gasps in the cold air. “What are you doing up here? It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah,” Vesta says. “We saw someone up here from the beach and we thought it might be a jumper.”

Athena rolls her eyes. “We did not. We just wanted to … you know … make sure.”

Aphrodite has come forward, stepping gingerly over the
icy rock. She peers over the dome of the rock into the darkness. “Wasn’t there a girl who killed herself by jumping from here?”

Gwen Marsh puts her hand on Aphrodite’s arm to pull her back. “No dear, that’s just another silly legend,” she reassures her. But Aphrodite is still looking at me for an answer and I can’t seem to think of one.

I
FIND MYSELF THINKING THAT IF WE CAN JUST MAKE IT
through the rest of December to Christmas everything will be all right. Athena is going to stay with her aunt and there’s a possibility her mother might even be out of rehab for the holidays. Vesta is planning to read
Bleak House
by the pool at her grandparents’ condominium in Miami. Aphrodite will see Brian and realize that those letters have all been lies. After all, I tell her, you can’t believe everything you read.